EAST of downtown Los
Angeles, just east of East L.A., where the Interstate 10 freeway careens or
crawls well beyond the last breath of the ocean toward the Inland Empire, is a
series of towns in the San Gabriel Valley. This sprawl looks just like any
other tentacle of the southern-California megalopolis except that here the
signs for the Rite Aid drugstore, the Walgreen's, the Church of the Latter-Day
Saints, and the car wash are in Chinese. Here in the wide-aisled supermarkets,
alongside the Fruit Loops and the Oreos, are tanks of live geoduck and carp,
pig snouts and ears and feet, and more than twenty varieties of soy sauce.

This is not a traditional Chinatown; Los Angeles has one of those, too, of
course, urban and crowded, but in the San Gabriel Valley the sidewalks aren't
wet with fish entrails and the unfamiliar produce doesn't spill into the
gutters. Beginning with Monterey Park and spreading into Alhambra, San Gabriel,
Rosemead, San Marino, South Pasadena, Rowland Heights, Hacienda Heights, West
Covina, Walnut, City of Industry, Diamond Bar, Arcadia, and Temple City, the
largest concentration of Chinese in the United States lives in middle-class and
upper-middle-class suburbia, a twenty-mile swath of unassuming wooden
bungalows, 1970s stucco condominiums, and lushly landscaped faux-Spanish
developments, shot through with commercial strips and studded with mini-malls.
Here is the best Chinese food in America.

Food critics agree that Chinese and French, as Julia Child says, "are the two
great cuisines of the world," and the San Gabriel Valley has what Chinese-food
aficionados find elusive in the United States—real Chinese food. Unlike even
the restaurants in New York's and San Francisco's Chinatowns, which are often
crowded with tourists on Saturday nights, the hundreds of restaurants here feel
no pressure to Americanize, because they cater almost exclusively to the area's
huge population of recent immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland
China; Chinese-Americans who have come from all over southern California and
the rest of the country; and delegations from the People's Republic of China.

Here you can encounter tastes that can be found scarcely anywhere else in the
Western Hemisphere: dense, chewy hand-cut Shanxi noodles; crispy ground pork
spicy with garlic and chilis and the fresh burst of cilantro on soft sesame
rolls; tofu as creamy as yogurt; chicken stir-fried with whole red chilis as
they do it in Szechuan, until the oil permeates the meat; wheaty "pancakes"
whose delicate layers unwind in your hand; Taiwanese dried beef; gingery
chicken soup in which the intensely flavored broth comes entirely from
condensed steam; and sweet almond tea with beads of tapioca as big as marbles
at the bottom of the glass. As a recent visitor from the People's Republic put
it, the food in the San Gabriel Valley "has taste of Chinese."

THE San Gabriel Valley didn't become "China Valley" spontaneously. In this
respect the area resembles much of the rest of Los Angeles, which didn't evolve
so much as it was invented, taking the form willed by particular men—usually
real-estate developers. In 1970, two years before a developer named Frederic
Hsieh bought his first property in Monterey Park, that city was about 50
percent Caucasian, 34 percent Hispanic, and 15 percent Asian, with the majority
of the Asians being Japanese—though among the recent arrivals were a few young
Chinese professionals like Hsieh. Monterey Park was perceived as a community
for those who had modestly made it, a place like lots of other Los Angeles
suburbs where a family could buy a quiet, relatively inexpensive home close to
the freeways and downtown. But Hsieh, who continued to buy and develop property
in Monterey Park, imagined something much more ambitious. In 1977 he announced
to the town's incredulous Chamber of Commerce, "You may not know it, but
[Monterey Park] will serve as the mecca for Chinese business."

Hsieh understood that many Chinese with capital to invest were poised to come
to America, for the 1965 Immigration Act had dramatically increased the yearly
immigration quota from the People's Republic of China and Taiwan to the United
States. Because of political instability on Taiwan, the increasingly wealthy
population there was a large potential immigrant pool, particularly after 1982,
when, Taiwan having relaxed its emigration laws, the United States gave that
country its own significant quota. The task Hsieh set for himself was to divert
this stream from the traditional U.S. destinations for Chinese immigrants—San
Francisco and New York—to suburban Los Angeles. Using an attractive
translation of "Monterey Park"—Mengtelu Gongyuan, meaning "Lush, Very Green
Park"—Hsieh aggressively marketed the city in Taiwan and Hong Kong as the
"Chinese Beverly Hills," promoting its school systems, its proximity to
downtown, and its good weather. The campaign worked, drawing hundreds of
thousands of Chinese, overwhelmingly from Taiwan, to the area that soon became
known as "Little Taipei." Today Monterey Park, with a population that is 60
percent Asian, has a higher concentration of Chinese than any other city in the
country. And as the population has increased in number and affluence, it has
spread north and east, across the San Gabriel Valley as a whole.

Many in this immigrant wave came with the resources to transform the San
Gabriel Valley in just the way Hsieh had anticipated. "First it was the
real-estate people, and then trading companies, heavy investors, people that
come with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash," a longtime Monterey Park
resident explained to Forbes in 1985. So much money poured into the city
that tire stores, veterinary hospitals, and doughnut shops were converted into
banks. Greater Los Angeles became the largest Chinese business center in North
America, and now the San Gabriel Valley is both one of the engines of the
southern-California economy and a base for Taiwanese and Hong Kong businesses
to expand to other parts of the continent.

Although not all immigrants to the San Gabriel Valley are flush with cash, as a
group they are very different from the proletarian work force that lives in,
say, New York's Chinatown. Most are highly educated, working in health care,
education, and computer technology, for instance, along with banking, real
estate, and international trade. By now they have transformed not only Monterey
Park but nearly the whole San Gabriel Valley into a focal point of the
interdependent Pacific Rim economy, so that it attracts investment from Taiwan,
Hong Kong, and mainland China (in the past four years overseas Chinese
investment in Los Angeles County as a whole has approached $1 billion) and
generates capital to be reinvested and goods to be exchanged in Asia. Hsieh
eventually expanded his operations across the Pacific, turning back on itself
the process he helped to engender and reflecting the interconnectedness of Asia
and the San Gabriel Valley.

ALL of this, obviously, has important implications for the global economy and
for ethnic and class relations and political power in southern California—in
fact, the San Gabriel Valley has been the subject of numerous sociological
studies. We came to China Valley recently, however, not to explore weighty
issues but to eat.

Stand at almost any point on Atlantic or Garvey, Valley or Garfield—the four
major streets that intersect like a tick-tack-toe frame in China Valley—and
you can count five, seven, eleven Chinese restaurants, from six-table
storefront dumpling houses with fluorescent lights and linoleum floors to
marbled and mirrored 800-seat palaces whose parking lots are stuffed with the
Mercedes, Infinitis, and BMWs of customers who can afford to pay $40 for
braised goose webs with spiny sea cucumbers and $90 for bird's-nest soup.
Driving east on Valley, you pass rows of restaurants on both sides of the
street, interrupted by mini-malls in which nearly every store is a restaurant.
Keep going and you reach the San Gabriel Square, once a drive-in theater, now a
mall the size of a city block, built of stucco to resemble a Spanish mission,
with two floors of restaurants—all Chinese but one, which is Japanese. Get on
the 60 Freeway and drive still farther east to the eerie outskirts of
metropolitan Los Angeles, where land prices fall and strawberry fields abut
railroad warehouses behind never-ending discount malls, and just off the
highway it's the same: malls filled with Chinese restaurants, across the street
from more malls filled with Chinese restaurants.

In part, the sheer number of immigrants keeps the food authentic and the
restaurant business thriving. The Chinese are so obsessed with food that one
Chinese greeting means "Have you eaten?" Thomas Tseng, an urban planner who
grew up in Rowland Heights and watched that town's commercial strip change from
barber shops and bowling alleys to Chinese restaurants, explains that in
Chinese culture socializing is almost impossible without food. As he puts it,
"You have to have good food with good conversation." Given that the first order
of business when friends and family get together is to decide where they're
going to eat, it's no surprise that so many restaurants are packed every
weekend. On weeknights restaurants cater to the young professionals in the San
Gabriel Valley who have the proclivity and funds to eat out as often as five or
six nights a week.

Because so many restaurants are packed so close together, the competition to
serve the best food at the lowest prices is fierce. Restaurateurs complained in
late 1995 to Shawn Hubler, of the Los Angeles Times, that to keep up
they are forced to steal one another's chefs and managers, undercut one
another's prices, and stage, say, twenty-eight-course banquets with imported
guest chefs. When they see a competitor succeed with a new enterprise or in a
new location, they open a copy next door. And the informal places that one
would expect to be inexpensive, in which the owner is the chef and manager, are
compelled in this sea of restaurants to hold prices lower than low to compete.
Six dishes at one of these restaurants, far more than enough food for four big
eaters, usually costs less than $30.

But the San Gabriel Valley owes its stellar cuisine to more than the plethora
of customers and restaurants. The same factors that make the area interesting
sociologically—the predominance of immigrants from Taiwan, the population's
relative wealth and continued ties to Asia, and the area's suburban
character—make it unique culinarily.

THE finest Chinese food in the world is in Taiwan," Barbara Tropp, a food
writer specializing in Chinese cuisine, asserts. Nina Simonds, another
prominent Chinese-food expert, calls Taiwan a "treasure trove of cooking." The
island's gastronomic distinction is in large part a reaction to the decline of
cuisine on the mainland, particularly after the Communist takeover in 1949. In
the People's Republic, communism's utilitarian bent first poisoned the culinary
arts and then, in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, tried to deracinate
what were regarded as the insidious strains of China's former culture.
Meanwhile, in Taiwan the Nationalists worked with almost religious fervor to
preserve Chinese artistic forms, including gastronomic traditions, which many
consider to be as essential to China's culture as its music, art, and dance.

After 1949, when the Nationalists fled to Taiwan from all over the Chinese
mainland, the island became a microcosm of that huge country, and its cookery
came to demonstrate the glorious range of Chinese cuisine. The far-flung
regions of China, each with its own distinct gastronomic style, have given rise
to at least 5,000 well-established dishes. So various is this cuisine, Julia
Child told us not long ago, that she could happily eat Chinese food every night
for the rest of her life. In other cultures crowding such disparate regional
traditions onto one small island might have resulted in a new form altogether,
a blending of styles, but, as Tropp explains, that idea is anathema to most
Chinese sensibilities. Chinese expatriates saw Taiwan as a haven in which to
preserve and refine China's gastronomic traditions, so that the island now
boasts all the styles of the mainland in addition to its own distinct
cuisine.

Immigrants have transplanted this range and refinement to the San Gabriel
Valley. "It's almost as if an entire community moved intact to California,"
Simonds says. In the early 1970s Simonds, who lives in Massachusetts, went to
Taiwan to learn Chinese cookery, but today her mentor lives in Monterey Park.
When Simonds went to visit her, the teacher took her to a restaurant whose
chef, originally from Beijing, had taught Simonds how to make Peking duck.

Many San Gabriel Valley restaurateurs reinvigorate their menus by making a
couple of trips a year to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Canton, and especially Taipei to
identify culinary variations and refinements and to lure top chefs. These chefs
find that they are simultaneously sought after by restaurants in all these
cities and also those in Vancouver, San Francisco, and the San Gabriel
Valley—which effectively make up a single international market. For
restaurants in the valley, keeping up with Asia is essential in order to please
the sophisticated local diners, who are themselves regularly jetting back to
Asia and presumably eating very well there.

MOST of the giant, formal restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley are Cantonese,
but this is hardly the Americanized "Cantonese" of the old-fashioned chop-suey
house. Since the Szechuan and Hunan craze of the 1970s, Caucasians who want to
appear sophisticated about Chinese food have looked down their noses at
Cantonese restaurants, but that's because they've been served too much gooey
sweet-and-sour pork and have never tasted true Cantonese cooking. The Cantonese
are, as the Chinese food scholar Kenneth Lo has written, "the sybarites of
China so far as food is concerned," and no other regional cooking can compare
to Cantonese for "indulgence, variety and range of repertoire." An incredible
number of foods flourish in Canton's semitropical climate, and the Cantonese
take full advantage of this abundance. (We use the term "foods" loosely—the
Cantonese are justly famous for their lack of squeamishness. As the Chinese
joke, the Cantonese will eat anything that flies, anything that swims, and
anything that has legs except the table.)

Taoist principles call for ingredients to be eaten as close to the way they
exist in nature as possible, never overcooked or overseasoned. (Chicken, for
instance, is served pink at the bone, and red marrow is the mark of a
well-prepared bird.) Cantonese cooking is refined, often done very quickly by
steaming or stir-frying, and nearly always light. The Cantonese even favor a
soy sauce less viscous and dark than that used in other regions, and their
menus tend to emphasize seafood, as the walls of fish tanks in San Gabriel
restaurants attest. The Cantonese, who eat five to seven little meals a day so
as not to stuff themselves in the warm weather, are also, of course, famous for
their dim sum, and lines wind out the doors of valley restaurants on Saturdays
and Sundays for that Chinese version of brunch.

Their size may make the Cantonese places the most conspicuous restaurants in
the valley, but a random sampling of some of the smaller places packed cheek by
jowl along the boulevards and in the mini-malls reveals an astounding variety
of cuisines. Recently immigrants from the People's Republic and ethnic Chinese
from Vietnam have added to the diversity. Probably no region of China or style
of Chinese cooking is unrepresented here. There are Buddhist vegetarian
restaurants, where tofu is artfully shaped to look and taste like pork,
chicken, or fish. There are Taiwanese restaurants serving Japanese-influenced
foods—steamed shrimp with mustard sauce, baked fish with miso, and even sushi.
There are extraordinarily authentic Szechuan restaurants serving dishes that
combine the numbing heat of peppercorns with the spicy heat of red chilis, like
one whose name we saw translated as "spicy with spicy."

There are Shanghai restaurants, serving the cuisine of the rich coastal
provinces of Zhejing and Jiangsu—perhaps the most sophisticated restaurants in
the San Gabriel Valley. These places eschew fierce spices, concentrating
instead on bringing out the natural flavors of foods with delicate and
ultra-refined seasonings, complemented by vinegar, ginger, scallions, and other
aromatics. Even a dish that may taste fresh and unspiced in fact usually
requires elaborate preparation: for example, the classic xiao long
bao—dainty, bite-sized pork dumplings stuffed with a complex filling and
an aspic that melts as the dumplings are steamed, ten at a time in a bamboo
steamer (which even imparts its own flavor). They burst with juice in your
mouth.

Shanghai restaurants also feature freshwater ingredients like those of the
provinces' many rivers and lakes—crab, eel, shrimp, duck, watercress, and
bamboo shoots—and incorporate more wine, sugar, and honey in their
preparations than do restaurants that specialize in other regional cooking
styles. They use special dark soy sauces to produce dishes like "simmered fish
tails," in which whole fish are braised in soy sauce, scallions, and ginger
until they take on a coppery color and the bones dissolve.

China Valley also has Islamic restaurants, serving food introduced to Beijing
by the Mongols, where customers cook paper-thin slices of lamb, glass noodles,
and vegetables in communal bowls of steaming soup, dip them in sauces, and eat
them with sesame cakes. And there are places that specialize in the thick,
irregular noodle of the Shanxi province; places that serve Hunan honey ham;
places that suffuse peppery morning-glory stems with garlic, as the ethnic
Chinese do in Thailand; places where you can get soupy Fujianese dishes and
translucent crepes you paint with sauce and roll around elaborate fillings, to
combine more than ten tastes and textures. There are even several examples of
an anomalous pan-Asian and American amalgam known as a Hong Kong coffee shop,
where at 3:00 A.M. you can get dishes like shredded beef on spaghetti,
thousand-year-old-egg congee, and club sandwiches.

ANNA Chi, an independent filmmaker and a casting consultant for such
movies as Nixon and The Joy Luck Club, grew up in mainland China
and now lives on the Westside of Los Angeles. Ironically, Chi, who was once a
leader of the Red Guard and even the subject of a Cultural Revolution poster,
has an almost fanatical appreciation of Chinese food. Like many
Chinese-Americans who live in southern California outside the San Gabriel
Valley, she goes there twice a week or so to eat. Her Chinese friends from
other parts of the United States or from the People's Republic always insist on
being taken to Monterey Park, as the area is often collectively called. In this
mecca of Chinese food they have been known to start early and go from
restaurant to restaurant, exhausting the possibilities of an entire mini-mall.

We took the same approach when we devoted an evening with Chi to xiao
chi, or "little eating," restaurants, where you can get snacks or lots of
different foods, simply prepared, rather than formal courses of complex dishes.
We started at a Mandarin restaurant, which, like many others, has an English
name, Mastro's Food, that bears no relation to its Chinese name, Three Family
Village. Northern Chinese cooking relies heavily on wheat rather than rice, and
works that grain to the limit, producing breads and pastas in all sorts of
shapes and weights and flavors. Noodles in particular are so important that
Mastro's, like most northern-style kitchens, employs a special "white-board"
chef just for them. (The "red-board" chef prepares the meat.) We made a tiny
dent in the array of handmade noodles, ordering three at one
sitting—"shredded," "cat's ear," and "wheat knot." One came in a soup, and the
other two were sautéed with a typical northern combination of garlicky
pork, vegetables, and plum sauce. With our noodles we sampled what in Beijing
are everyday comfort foods: spicy pork on sesame buns, looking remarkably like
barbecued-pork sandwiches; cornmeal porridge; and smoky cubes of gelatinized
pork skin sprinkled with raw garlic, which the Chinese munch while they drink,
the way Americans eat peanuts.

Then, after devouring juicy shrimp-and-leek dumplings in the fluorescent pallor
of a tiny dumpling house, we went to a place popular with late-night snackers,
Lu's Garden, where a huge bowl of smooth rice congee, or porridge, studded with
sweet potatoes is the centerpiece of every meal. The congee there is
complemented by crunchy, salty, and spicy side dishes—exotic leafy greens and
asparagus (green vegetables always look especially lustrous in China Valley
restaurants), shrimp, and a mess of teeny dried anchovies, for instance.
Finally we stopped at Tung Lai Shun, a branch of a Chinese Islamic restaurant
famous in Beijing (Simonds claims the branch is just as good as the original),
for a loaf of sesame bread stuffed with scallions, in case we got hungry on the
way home.

Twice during the evening we found ourselves seated next to delegations from the
People's Republic, easily identifiable in southern California by their stiff
suits. The San Gabriel Valley offers these visiting Chinese, for whom Taiwan is
effectively off limits, the best opportunity to sample a greater variety of
regional specialties, often prepared with fresher ingredients, than they could
find in most of their home towns.

SO the good news is that a fantastic variety of terrific and authentic, not to
mention well-priced, Chinese food is right there in suburban Los Angeles,
seemingly as accessible as Disneyland and Universal Studios. The bad news is
that you probably can't have it. The downside of a suburban Chinatown that
attracts few tourists is that restaurateurs have no incentive to make their
food easy for non-Chinese to order. If you've ever enviously eyed the
interesting dishes that the Chinese people at the table next to you are
enjoying, or pointed at one of the "specials" handwritten in Chinese and been
assured by a smiling waiter that you won't like it, you understand the
frustration.

Of course, we have to admit that those waiters are often right. Having spent
years tracking down authentic Chinese food in holes-in-the-wall from Vancouver
to Queens, we thought we were bold and sophisticated diners, but when faced
with dishes like twice-cooked pig's intestine, sliced beef lung, and shredded
pig's ear, we searched the menu for something that sounded more like kung pao
chicken. We wouldn't have eaten nearly so well in the San Gabriel Valley if we
hadn't often had Chi with us to choose the best dishes, to translate, and to
insist that yes, indeed, the confused-looking Westerners fumbling with their
chopsticks would like it.

One big problem is the menus. When we went to the Garvey Restaurant, where the
Szechuan food was nothing like the takeout we order from the Szechuan
restaurants ubiquitous in our own neighborhood, Chi examined the Chinese signs
taped to the wall and chose six dishes, only one of which appeared on the
English menu. Even when the names were translated into English, the terms were
often meaningless (the cat's-ear noodles became "pegular" noodles, for
instance) or confusing (the spicy pork on sesame buns was called "pork with
seame cookied pie") or even downright unappetizing (like "noodle in gray
soup").

In part, obviously, this is a problem of language. Lui Zhishun, the young owner
and chef of the Garvey Restaurant, left Chongqing to come to Monterey Park only
five years ago, and because he spends sixteen hours a day in the markets and at
his restaurant, he has had little time to study English. Nor does he really
need to learn it in a place where the bankers, the video-store clerks, the
dentists, and the mechanics speak Chinese. (Zhishun's restaurant, by the way,
like many of the small places in the San Gabriel Valley, had a short life. The
Garvey Restaurant is now a Hong Kong-style seafood house.)

But in part, as Kevin Wu, the owner of the Royal Star (originally a branch of
Monterey Park's famous Ocean Star that opened in the affluent Westside
community of Santa Monica last year), laments, it is difficult to persuade
Chinese restaurateurs that there's any point in making the effort to describe
dishes in English with the complex and compelling detail they lavish on the
Chinese menu. They're proud of a cuisine that has been continually refined over
a 3,000-year history and don't really believe that Westerners can appreciate
it. Even a San Gabriel Valley acquaintance of Chi's assumed that Chi had become
"pretty American" after ten years in the United States, living on the Westside,
and so suggested that they meet for lunch at the Monterey Park branch of Marie
Callender's, the southern-California equivalent of Howard Johnson's and one of
the very few non-Chinese restaurants still in the area.

ON our way to see the largest Buddhist temple in the Western Hemisphere, we
stopped for gas in the eastern reaches of China Valley, where all the
Spanish-style houses in the quintessential southern-California subdivisions
look alike. We asked a man in a BMW at the pump next to us to recommend a
restaurant in the area. "I think most of the food is too weird for you," he
said. But when we assured him that we liked weird food, he was very forthcoming
and directed us to a Taipei restaurant popular with Hong Kong movie stars,
whose pictures are on its walls.

Wu Gee is just off the freeway in the Diamond Plaza, which is full of Chinese
restaurants, and only a quarter of a mile away from the Hong Kong Plaza, which
is also full of Chinese restaurants, which is across the street from the
Pacific Plaza, a mall in the shape of a medieval castle, which has a food court
full of Chinese restaurants, which is right next door to yet another mall, this
one without a name but not without Chinese restaurants.

We had never had Taiwanese fire pot before, as the waiter quickly ascertained
when we tried to order what were apparently ridiculous combinations. Despite an
impenetrable language barrier, the three of us finally managed to cobble
together some sort of lunch he could approve. We figured the hard part was
over.

But not long after he had brought us a huge bowl of broth that roiled on the
table's hot plate, six or seven plates of raw food—including bright-green
leaves, thinly sliced beef, and enoki mushrooms—and little bowls of chili
sauce, minced garlic, and chopped scallions, he realized that now he had to
teach us how to eat the stuff. Once he had shown us that we weren't to drink
the broth but rather to cook the other ingredients in it, and once he had mixed
our spices and chilis and soy sauce in the proper proportions and demonstrated
that we were to season our cooked foods with this, and once he had kept us from
dumping all the beef into the pot at once, he invited a friend from the kitchen
into the dining room to watch us eat.

Yes, we were a spectacle. In this case two Caucasians eating in a mall in the
middle of suburbia made a very weird sight indeed. But finding the exotic amid
the familiar is not an unusual experience in Los Angeles. No one can argue that
much of southern California is not outwardly homogenous. Much of the population
has attained the standard trappings of the American good life—the shiny car,
the new house, the well-tended lawn, maybe even the pool. But as the San
Gabriel Valley attests, for those who know Los Angeles, its charm is how it
juxtaposes this superficial homogeneity—what some might even call
sterility—with the vibrant and the strange.

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In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

The combination of suspicion and reverence that people feel toward the financially successful isn’t unique to the modern era, but reflects a deep ambivalence that goes back to the Roman empire.

In the early 20th century, Dale Carnegie began to travel the United States delivering to audiences a potent message he would refine and eventually publish in his 1936 bestseller, How To Win Friends and Influence People: “About 15 percent of one’s financial success is due to one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering—to personality and the ability to lead people.” Carnegie, who based his claim on research done at institutes founded by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie (unrelated), thus enshrined for Americans the notion that leadership was the key to success in business—that profit might be less about engineering things and more about engineering people. Over 30 million copies of Carnegie’s book have been sold since its publication.